What to do instead
Stop being the only route between people
A manager who answers every question correctly keeps the network at its current size. Answering with a name instead is slower and more durable.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The senior engineerThe pair that came out of a shared on-call week
- 02The second engineer
- 03The designer
- 04The data analyst
- 05The product manager
five people · 10 possible pairs · 1 of them has worked on something together · 3 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, with the manager left out so that what remains is what the team has without them.
Where projects cross several roles, teams can review the complete overview to make hours and handoffs visible enough for a useful capacity discussion.
Teams can compare this approach with the practical guidance available from INSEAD.
A question arrives. You know the answer. Answering takes eleven seconds and the person who asked gets on with their work.
Done four times a day for a year, that is the mechanism by which a team stays a wheel. Nothing about any individual answer is wrong, and the accumulation is the shape of the network.
This note is about the alternative, which is not withholding answers.
What the eleven seconds buys and costs
It buys speed, obviously, and it buys accuracy: the manager usually does know, and the answer they give is usually better than the one the asker would have assembled.
It costs the search. The thirty seconds somebody would have spent working out which colleague might know is the thirty seconds in which they discover that their colleagues know things. Removed often enough, the asker develops a model of the team in which there is one source of information, and the model is accurate because it is self-fulfilling.
It also costs the answerer something they usually do not count. A manager who is the only route is interrupted continuously, cannot take a week off without the team stalling, and is doing a job that gets larger as the team gets larger.
Answering with a name
The replacement is to answer roughly one question in three with a person instead of an answer. "The QA engineer hit this in September — ask them." "The designer decided that, and had a reason."
Three things make it work rather than seem evasive.
- Be specific. A name, and what that person knows, and ideally when they knew it. "Ask around" is an abdication; "ask this person about that thing" is a routing instruction and lands as helpfulness.
- Say why you are not answering, once, as a general statement to the team rather than per question. "I am trying to answer with names where I can, because I am a bottleneck and it is my problem to fix." People accept this immediately and it prevents the interpretation that you have become unhelpful.
- Answer directly when it is urgent or when the asker is stuck. The point is to shift the default, not to apply a rule. A new person on their second day gets the answer.
The other half: tell people what others know
Routing only works if you know where to route to, and the asker does not. So the second habit is to say, unprompted, what people are working on and what they have learned.
This is most of what the rotating weekly note does automatically, which is why that mechanism is worth more than it looks. Where there is no such note, it happens in small acts: mentioning in a meeting that somebody solved a thing last month, forwarding a question to two people rather than one, saying "that is the same problem the analyst had" out loud.
What gets worse before it gets better
Be prepared for a month in which things are slower and somebody complains.
Questions get answered in an hour instead of a minute. Two people spend twenty minutes on something you could have settled in two. Somebody gets a worse answer from a colleague than they would have had from you, and acts on it.
That is the cost of the transition and it is real. It ends when the pairs exist, because an established pair answers each other faster than a hub does — there is no queue.
What this is not
It is not stepping back from the team. The note on manager-shaped teams has the full version of this caution: a manager who simply withdraws from the middle of a sparse network removes the only route between most of its members, and the exchanges stop rather than rerouting.
Routing is the opposite of withdrawing. It is more work, not less, in the short run: you have to know who knows what, keep track of it, and spend the extra seconds naming somebody instead of answering. What goes away is not the manager's involvement but the manager's monopoly.
When to answer anyway
The habit is a default, not a rule, and four situations override it.
The question is urgent and somebody is blocked now.
The asker is new. For the first month or two, a fast correct answer is worth more than a lesson about the team's structure, and their licence to ask freely expires soon enough without being rationed.
Nobody else knows. If you are genuinely the only source, routing somebody to a colleague who will spend twenty minutes failing is not delegation, it is theatre, and it costs two people's time to make a point.
And the question is about them — their work, their progression, their position. That is your job and there is nobody to route it to.
How to tell it is working
Not by the volume of questions you get, which will fall for several reasons including some bad ones.
By the grid. The figure to watch is the number of pairs that do not include you, and it is the one figure in this whole method that moves only when somebody acts on purpose. If it has gone from one to four in a quarter, the routing worked.